


I See

by Vee



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Eye Gouging, Gen, Headcanon, Psychic Abilities, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-04
Updated: 2013-03-04
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vee/pseuds/Vee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bit of speculative headcanon on just what happened to Akashi's eyes, and what the Emperor Eye is all about</p>
            </blockquote>





	I See

“He said ‘ _I’m going to kill you’_ and then he came at me. He didn’t do it to disarm me, he did it to hurt me the most in the most sadistic way he knew.” Akashi paused, and looked at the window. It took longer than he was used to. He’d need to do that – get used to it – as quickly as possible. Any training was a matter of perseverance and determination, pushing to the limit and bending the limit as much as possible, finessing it just until it came close enough to break, until the limit was nothing more than a membrane to see right through. None of that was worth telling his friends yet, though. They wouldn’t believe the progress he’d made unless they could see through his eyes.

He smiled to himself at the phrasing of that thought, but went on. “He knew judo, didn’t I hear someone say?”

Shintarou nodded and breathed out, probably exasperated by the entire ordeal. “He practiced judo, yes. He couldn’t have been very good, though, considering not only his execution but the fact that you set him off so easily.”

“Well, he won’t be practicing anymore,” Akashi said, his voice thin with nonchalance. The boy had been removed from school, and was facing disciplinary review before his ultimate scholastic fate would be decided. Psychiatric evaluations, at the very least, would follow him into university.

_You set him off so easily._

When in fact, that was not a flaw of the boy’s composure at all. When in fact, it had not been Akashi’s fault at all to begin with. When in fact, if he hadn’t felt the need to place a crown of his knowledge on the entire situation, it may have been Daiki against the hallway wall with the hands around his skull.

“What did it feel like?” Ryouta asked, because Ryouta was concerned and he wanted to empathize, and Ryouta was a tactile sort who had to know or else he might never understand.

“Very strange,” Akashi replied, sounding more like a stargazer with his eye to the sky rather than a teenager reliving his trauma. He remembered the arm colliding with his collar, pushing him into the wall and knocking the bag from his hand. It hit the floor with an almost graceful sound, thumping politely just out of their way before Akashi felt the hands around his face, felt his head hit the brick less heavily than it might have, had Daiki not tried to intervene. The boy was big, though – neither was really a match for a guy like that, fired up like that. Luckily – an unusual word to apply to the situation – he was thrown off enough to not smash Akashi’s head open right there.

Instead, the fingers spidered around his head, and by the time Akashi had the presence of mind to wrench down on the outstretched arms, he knew what was happening.

He felt the pressure on his sinuses, on both sides. For a moment – for a split-second that he didn’t talk about to anyone – it felt almost nice. Like the sort of relief you’re not meant to feel, in the moment that so much pressure finds so much release, right before the nerves have something to say about it.

In the moment he had enough power to dissuade the right arm, the left overcompensated. The assailant didn’t go through with it, as most humans probably wouldn’t, when his thumb hit warmth and he felt the squelch of something he had never anticipated feeling. At the last minute, he shied away and didn’t pull the trigger, didn’t dig in and feel the give of tissue or the snap of tendons. However, the damage had been done.

The anesthetic had only been local when the doctor officially assessed the damage, saw the lesions left behind and determined that the eye couldn’t be saved. Akashi didn’t tell Ryouta about the most interesting thing he felt, which was not the pain when he was kneeling and holding his own eye by a few shreds of muscle and nerve, shaking and unsure of whether to put it back in, unsure of how it could even fit, feeling the hot, unexpected consistency of the viscera. That hadn’t been anything because he hadn’t been in that moment. On the operating table he was all there, battling with the numb side of his face to feel all he could, twitching and swallowing thickly to try and even out the imbalance until he heard the sound of the scissors and felt the weight of it gone just like that, like a button snipped from a fraying thread. The emptiness was the strangest part.

They kept it to show him, because he asked that they show him, and maybe they thought it was because he wanted to see why it had to be removed. The lesions were obvious, and a fingernail had scratched the cornea, which had gotten dirty in transit, and had likely been infected. Akashi asked to hold it, and though the doctor laughed uncomfortably he allowed it. It was heavier than Akashi expected, and he weighed it in his palm, nodding at it and watching the movement of his own hand with the good eye that remained, interested in the way the movement seemed quicker, almost magnified. He was acutely aware of how and where and on what synapses his field of vision was working. The seed of possibility was already in his mind, then, despite the pain medication fogging up his critical reasoning. That eye had actually been the detriment.

“Do you want to keep it?” The doctor joked.

Akashi said yes, thanked him for asking, and inquired on the proper way to store it. His mother immediately said no and told him to stop being strange, to sleep off the drugs and they’d go home in the evening.

“The eye socket actually cleans out and heals up remarkably,” he explained to Atsushi, who did little more than listen when he didn’t apologize for not being there. “The human body is, despite how fragile it seems, very versatile. Adaptable. Obviously I wouldn’t, but I could poke around in there and barely feel a thing now. The nerves are dead, for the most part.”

“It looks good, though,” Atsushi said, referring to his new eye, mismatched on purpose and only unnatural if you looked closely. And yet no one really wanted to look at him, not for more than was necessary. He supposed he was self-conscious, but he only felt that way when someone dared to squint at him and try to figure out what was off. There was something unnerving about him now, about the way his good eye moved out of sync, and his new one didn’t move at all. And yet – and this was just what Daiki said, probably because he was trying to be optimistic – it looked like it did. Maybe that’s why no one wanted to look, because every now and then there would be the illusion of the glass sliding this way or that, following Akashi’s line of vision before he moved so quickly that you couldn’t catch up.

The doctors laughed at the idea that he would play basketball competitively again. They’d been silenced completely when he was back on the courts within a week, and back in games within a month. Better, in fact. “Maybe you shouldn’t be point guard anymore,” Shintarou suggested, but it wasn’t because he doubted Akashi. He only wanted what was best for the team, after all. He wanted to win; they all did.

But then there was Tetsuya, saying no. No, Akashi is just fine. Which meant Akashi was better than fine.

“What happened, anyway?” Because it was something Daiki hadn’t explained, and no one wanted to press Akashi about. He always said the same thing and left it at that. “The guy said he was going to kill Akashi, and leapt at him, but what actually led up to that?”

Daiki shrugged into the effort of adjusting the bag on his shoulder, and looked like he would try to avoid the topic. When he looked at Tetsuya, though, he knew it was inevitable. He was going to tell someone, and it might as well have been him.

“He’s in Akashi’s class, okay? Like, I don’t know the specifics. He just came running up after us in the hallway after school and yelling at Akashi, telling him to explain himself, asking what he did. Apparently he was late for school that day, and they had a really important test, and he failed the test. He kept asking Akashi ‘ _how did you know?_ ’ and then ‘ _how did you do that?_ ’ Akashi was all like ‘ _I have no idea what you’re talking about_ ’ and the guy’s just _losing it_ at that point, saying something about three weeks ago when he shoved Akashi down when they were cleaning, just being a dick to him apparently, Akashi said those things were going to happen.”

“He predicted them?”

Daiki looked mildly unsettled, and wouldn’t meet Tetsuya’s eyes. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know.”

“So that was it?”

“No. No, man, it’s really weird what happened. Don’t tell anyone, okay? Like, don’t tell _anyone_ this because I don’t think Akashi wants anyone to know.”

Tetsuya didn’t move a muscle. Who would he tell?

Daiki sighed heavily. “I tried to get the guy to fuck off, you know? I pushed him around and told him I’d kick his ass, and he almost got into it with me, but then Akashi just tilted his head in this really weird way and...” He didn’t want to go on. He didn’t want to remember it. Finally he just blurted it out. “He said ‘ _you’re going to drown’_.”

Tetsuya was good at not giving reactions, even when Daiki looked like he was going to throw up at the memory combined with the moment. “And that’s when the guy—“

“Yeah, yeah.” Aomine nodded several times, very quickly. “Yeah, that was it.”

They kept walking in silence, and didn’t say another thing about it.

The memorial service was that weekend. Daiki didn’t attend. Neither did Akashi, but that was to be expected. The news had come suddenly, and the boating accident had happened on a relatively clear day in relatively calm coastal waters, less than 48 hours before the first meeting of the school’s disciplinary board concerning potential expulsion.

“I don’t believe that,” Tetsuya remarked flatly.

“Okay.” Daiki allowed him. “Yeah.”

Occasionally their eyes would meet when Akashi said or did something, or when things all aligned in exactly the right way, and they knew. Sometimes Tetsuya thought Shintarou knew, as well, but maybe that was just in his nature, his belief in fate and the great machine of humanity. When Akashi was exceptionally quiet, or when he excused himself early, and always politely, to spend the afternoon on his own, they wondered if he knew something he didn’t want to say, how suddenly he knew it, and how heavily that weighed.

The blissful and triumphant distraction of basketball was his only alternative. It wasn’t all the time, the flashes of complete clarity that he never invited in the everyday moments. When he concentrated on it, the feeling was perfection. And he only concentrated on it between the squeak of shoes and the thump of a ball on a court. When it got stronger, and when he got better, and when everyone around him got better as a result, he just thanked the absence of the useless hunk of muscle and nerve that had been there before.

When his mother told him about the news, about the sudden and tragic death of the young boy with so much ahead of him despite what he’d done, Akashi just let his lip twitch very slightly and said, “I see.”

 


End file.
